The Plantation Roots of the Jergers

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Learn more at alliot com y bank, member of TIC Call o Media . june eleventh, nineteen sixty three was a Tuesday . In Saigon, Buddhist monk Tekwan D uk set a cushion down in the middle of a busy intersection and began to pray as another monk doused him in gasoline . He struck the match himself , immolating himself in protest of the South Vietnamese government . In Greece , the Prime Minister resigned over some nasty disagreement with the king . In Tehran , the Shah made promises about upcoming elections in response to days of unrest after his arrest of Ayatola Komini . On the other side of the world, in Jackson, Mississippi , a convicted murderer dying of lung cancer received the first ever human lung transplant at the University of Miss issippi Medical Center . Elsewhere in town, Mississippi's NAACP field secretary spent most of his afternoon meeting with NAACP lawyers, going over their testimony for an upcoming appearance before Congress . Just north of Jackson, in Wyna, Mississippi , activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were desperately trying to get half a dozen voting rights organizers out of the little county jail . The group had sent an observer to the jail to check on their condition , but he'd been beaten senseless and arrested too. A snick worker who had managed to get inside of the jail reported that one of the teenage girls who'd been arrested had been beaten so badly she couldn't speak . The arrestees had been on their way to Greenwood, Mississippi to register black voters . In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to physically block the university's first black students from registering for classes . President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and dispatched soldiers who were prepared to physically remove the governor from the doorway if necessary . In Washington, DC, President Kennedy asked the networks to clear the eight PM times slot . He was going to have to say something to the country . He wasn't sure what would happen in Tuscaloosa. If a federalized national guardsman put his hands on the Governor of Alabama , the country would need to hear from the president . But Wallace blinked and the guardsman didn't have to do anything at all . The president addressed the nation anyway that night , and that NAACP field secretary watched that speech on TV just before his last meeting of the night . And on june eleventh , nineteen sixty three, in La Flore County, Mississippi , a fertilizer salesman made his rounds, extoling the virtues of delta liquid plant food to the cotton planners in his sales territory , or so he claimed . In his worklog for the afternoon of june eleventh , Byron Dela Beckwith claimed he lost a few hours to car trouble . And with a broken odometer , he figured no one could prove he drove to Jackson . He hadn't counted on dropping his rifle in that honeysuckle thicket I'm Molly Conger and this is where Little Guides A little after midnight on june twelfth , nineteen sixty three , Medgar Evers died . He was thirty seven years old . Evers was born in Mississippi in nineteen twenty five , and as a boy he, walked miles to and from his segregated school every day , a route that took him past a field, where a pile of bloody clothes had been left as a warning . The clothes had belonged to Willie Tingle , a black man accused of insulting a white woman. At fourteen years old, Medgar Evers witnessed the lynching of Willie Tingle . He saw a white mob dragging his father's friend through the streets behind a cart shooting and hanging him . And every day after that , Medger Evers stopped to look at Willie's bloody clothes in the field on his way to his segregated school . He dropped out of high school to enlist in the Army in nineteen forty three . The United States military was still segregated, and black soldiers were relegated to non combat roles , but ever served honorably . In Europe , he was one of countless black American soldiers who saw that it didn't have to be that way. Their black counterparts in the free French forces didn't suffer the same indignities . And when he got home after the war , Menker Evers wanted to vote . He and his brother organized a small group of black veterans to attempt to vote in their hometown of Decatur, Mississippi in nineteen forty six , but they were turned away from the polls by an angry white mob. He finished high school and got a college education , and for the next seventeen years , the rest of his life , Medgar Evers fought for civil rights in Mississippi . From nineteen fifty four until his death in nineteen sixty three, he was the NAACP field secretary in his home state . And in nineteen sixty three , he was murdered by Byron Elbeckwith , a segregationist active in his local white citizens council . Last week's episode was meant to be a stand alone sort of deal . It wasn't really about the murder of Medgar Everse, or about his murderer, Byron Dela Beckwith . It was about the attempted erasure of history by the Trump administration . The dust up over the brochures at the Medgar and Merley Ever's Home National Monument was just our window into that story . And those brochures were not, in the end , even changed at all . Last week, the latest reporting I had on the issue was from Mississippi Today back in February , and I told you that at least as of February , the brochures remained unchanged . Thanks to a listener down in Mississippi who visited the site on june teenth , I can update that to say that as of last week, the brochures at the Ever's Home National Park Site are available to the public and they have not been altered or censored. Even though I just touched briefly on the murder of Metger Evers while I was writing last week's episode , I spent a little bit of time researching it , just to give myself the context . And I was surprised how much of the story I didn't know and hadn't even considered . Byron Dilab wiff was a weird little guy . I mean, you could have guessed that, right? He fits the bill. Segregationist in the deep south in the sixties killed a black man, joined the clan. That's weird little guy territory . That would work as an episode. But I don't think I was ready for the abundant evidence of what a quintessential , weird little guy he was . I mean, racist white guy in Mississippi shot and killed a black civil rights activist, whites jury in Mississippi won't convict justices served decades later. I knew the shape of the story . Another awful chapter in the history of the American South, right? Racist guy does a racist thing for racist reasons the racist system shrugs . I don't know why I assumed that was kind of it . I know better than that. Of course there's more there. Of course there's a fascinating and infinitely distracting context . I was kind of thinking I would avoid another multi part series for a while just to shake things up , but I'm not sure that's possible . Every single piece of this story connects to the bigger narrative we've been working on over the last two years . I know I'm always saying that, and if anyone from marketing was listening to the show, they would tell me to stop saying that . But it really jum ped out at me this week when I realized that Medger Ears' children saw their father bleed out that night because they stayed up late to watch the president's speech . And the president was speaking on TV that night because the National Guard had been mobilized to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama that day . Not only that , at the moment that Medger Evers died , Fanny Lou Hamer was singing hymns through bleeding lips in a Mississippi jail cell ninety miles away . Those two historical facts occur red in the same instant. In last week's episode, I included a snippet of audio from Fanny Lou Hamer's speech to the nineteen sixty four Democratic National Convention Crediting Committee . I chose that clip to illustrate my point , mostly because I'm just particularly fond of that speech and I find it very moving . She was saying what I was trying to convey to you about fighting for an America that actually is what we've been promised , even though we know it isn't right now . Matt and I already had the audio saved and transcribed because I've used it before . Benny Hamer gave that speech at the DNC after she was denied a fair shot at running on a ballot in Mississippi And a few months after the convention, in January of nineteen sixty five, she escalated her protest and she took it to the United States Capitol Building on the first day of the Congressional Session . And there , in the Capitol Building , Fanny Lou Hamer was counter protested by George Lincoln Rockwell himself . If you remember the several months we spent last fall on Rockwell and his American Nazi party , you might remember this incident . Stormtrooper Robert Lloyd burst into the congressional chambers, wearing black face and no pants, screaming and making a scene and he was chased out. It was a whole ordeal . What I didn't put together though, what I didn't realize when I chose that clip again last week , is that if you listen to the whole speech , when she's speaking to the DNC in nineteen sixty four , she's describing a particular experience . It's something that happened to her while Medger Evers was being assassinated. It's something that happened to her on june eleventh , nineteen sixty three I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hurt . One white man my dress had worked up high . He walked over and pulled my dress I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up . I was in jail when Matthew Ellis was murdered . All of this is on account of we want to register to become first class citizens The night that Meger Evers died , Fanny Lou Hamer was ninety miles away in a jail cell . She and several organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were arrested on june ninth the, bus and they were taking back to Greenwood, Mississippi stopped briefly in nearby Wynonna . In jail , she was beaten so badly that she never really recovered . She suffered permanent damage to one kidney from the blows to her lower back . And they were on their way to Greenwood that day because they were headed to the Greenwood Office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , because the Black Voter Registration efforts there were really heating up . The Department of Justice had gotten involved earlier that year , threatening to take the city to court over their interference with the registration drive The DOJ backed down when the city promised to stop . But Greenwood residents , greenwood residents like Byron Dela Beckwith doubled down The organizers in Greenwood were very familiar with Byron Delabeckwith . He had this habit of driving around town and heckling and stalking and photographing and intimidating black residents , particularly those involved in civil rights demonstrations . His presence was so constant and so unsettling that a snick worker in Greenwood invited him to come to the office to try to have a civil conversation . I mean, bless their hearts they must have thought they could reason with the man , but he never took them up on the offer . But do you see a little how these pieces fit together ? These moments in time captured from different angles in episodes about different men , but they're all part of the same story . And that's why the characters keep recurring . In nineteen eighty three , when segregationist lawyer JB Stoner was on the run rather than showing up to serve his sentence for an old clan bombing , the FBI went looking for him , and one of the places they looked was at his old friend Byron Dela Beckwith's house . In nineteen eighty, when the FBI had no leads in the shooting of National Urban League President Vernon Jordan , they sent agents to question Byron Dela Beckwith A sniper had shot at a civil rights leader and that was his MO. It would be another few months before the FBI caught up with the actual shooter, Nazi serial killer Joseph Ball Franklin He was the subject of a series of episodes earlier this year . In the late nineteen seventies, when Beckw ith went to prison for the first time for attempting to murder the regional director of the ADL , he got fan mail from Aryan nations leader Richard Butler and white Aryan resistance leader Tom Metzer , and we've talked about countless times . The new Christian crusade church, the Christian identity church that would eventually be co owned by South African propartheid terrorist Monica Huggett St raised five thousand dollars for Beckwith to live off of after his release from prison in nineteen eighty . He'd become an adherent of Christian identity shortly before going to prison . In May of nineteen ninety one, when Byron Delibwith was sitting in jail finally about to face justice nearly three decades after killing Medgar Evers , his face was on the cover of an issue of the white Bere . Now this one's a deep cut. You might not remember this . It was a short lived newsletter published by Kansas City clansman Dennis Mehan , featured in the episodes back in December of twenty twenty . And when he published that issue in nineteen ninety one, Maehan had just returned from a clan rally in Jackson, Mississippi . In April of nineteen ninety one , four hundred clansmen and neo Nazis rallied in Jackson for Confederate Memorial Day , and Tom Metzker headlined a rally to raise money for Byron Delabeck . It might be faster to tell you which subjects of the show he isn't connected to . So maybe we should invest some time into seeing which other loose ends can be knitted back together . Because even leaving aside some larger exploration of the clan in Mississippi, which I'm very interested in , it turns out Pyron Dela Beckwitha is just a textbook weird little guy . He didn't just commit a racist murder. He wasn't just an ardent segregationist who assassinated a prominent civil rights leader . He was an imp otent wife beater who after being orphaned was raised by two eccentric uncles in the family's dilapidated plantation house . He was obsessed with sending furious little letters to the editor to the point that people around town laughed at him . He wasn't just a racist. Mississippi was full of racists, that's not really very special . He had an obsession with the mythology of the lostuse C of thea Confederacy that was baked into the same part of his brain that stored his childhood abandonment issues. He clung to the ideas of white supremacy and southern pride , because those lies felt like the only home he ever had . Perserving segregation by any means necessary was a way to keep the family lie alive , even when his entire family was dead Violence made him feel powerful . It was a way of exerting control in a life that was never as good as he felt like he was owed. He shot Megar Evere becausest he was a racist who was willing to kill to preserve segregation . Obviously . And quite frankly, if he hadn't shot Medgare Everest, it's reasonably likely that someone else would have . And Beckwith did go on to try and assassinate another guy a decade later. I'm not saying Byron Dela Beckwith isn't the racist assassin we think of him as he is . I'm just saying I didn't expect such a clear , direct correlation between the day his wife finally left him and the day he started making concrete plans to kill someone else. How does JP Morgan Chase help build a thriving economy? By listening. So we can support over seven million small businesses with coaching, capital, and connections to help them start grow, and hire. Together, we make what matters happen. Learn more at jpmorganchase. com slash America . Buy more, save more at Scandinavian Designs Furniture this fourth of July. For a limited time , save two hundred dollars instantly for every thousand dollars you spend in store. It's the perfect way to complete your look for less or splurge on your dream piece from living room to bedroom. Stop by a local showroom or shop online at scandavian designs. com Scandinavian designs , we make it simple. You make it home . In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live I was terrified . There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black . It scared the hell out of me. That was your first murder case. Yes, sir. It's fair to say this was the biggest case of your career? Yes, sir. Rape and murder chung is probably a challenge. Bad he gets. I would think so wake up. I'm the one that saw the murder take place by Crema and DePippo. Anthony de Pippo showed no signs of remorse , appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum . I said I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grave. Listen to the Devil's Quarry on the IHART Radio App app,le Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts . And to hear the Devil's Quarry ad free with exclusive content , subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts Keith Giomanco seemed like a mild mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else , a master of disguise who went on a crime spree . At the time did it seem like a crazy idea ? It seemed very crazy , but I felt so desperate that felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like ? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I want to I was trying to manifest success , every family has its secrets . But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deepcover The Family Man on the IHAT radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We won't even get to the murder today. I've already decided this is going to go on a while because we have to start at the beginning . How did he end up holding a rifle in honeysuckle thicket in Jackson, Mississippi on june eleventh, nineteen sixty three ? Well first of all, I regret to inform you that I had another full on meltdown some old racist name What even is a man's name ? I mean the whole Louis Lewis beam thing really wrecked me so maybe, I'm developing a complex or something, but it happened again . You probably know by now that one of the things I love to waste my own time on when I'm first sitting down with a new weird little guy is genealogy ? Does it often matter ? No, no, it really very rarely results in anything that I even tell you about . But occasionally we get something good , like Jack Kershaw's lie about his grandpa serving as a Confederate officer , when in reality, his grandfather not only did not serve in the Civil War , but I found a copy of his draft registration for the Union Army in Illinois . There was no Admiral Kershaw . My inability to skip this step is kind of like carrying a huge purse full of garbage . If you have a big purse, you know what I'm talking about. You get yourself out of a jam one time because you had something insane in your thirty pound purse , and then you spend the rest of your life with a sore shoulder because you might need everything you've ever owned , you know ? It's exactly like that, except instead I have detailed notes on the lives of the grandparents of all of America's weirdest racist . For the most part , it's only good for weird anecdotes. Like, did you know that George Lincoln Rockwell's mistress's sister was one of the hostages during the nineteen seventy seven Hanafi siege in Washington, DC when a black Muslim group held one hundred and fifty people hostage in a two day standoff with the police You do now ? Or one of Lewis Beam's daughters got arrested during the pandemic for putting her son in the tr unk of her car to go to a drive through COVID testing site because she didn't want to catch it from him . Interesting, sad, weird, stuff I didn't need . But now I know . My husband laughed at me when he came home from work one night this week to find me reading this old racist's grandfather's will from nineteen oh four so I could get to the bottom of this . So maybe I should have just skipped all this, but it's too late. We're on this ride together now . So the first problem is I thought his last name was Dale Leel Be ckwith . Byron DeLa Beckwith . So the de la Beckwith part is his last name , DE Space LA Space Beckwith . I interpreted the Dela portion of the name as a nobiliary particle . That's the term for the part of a last name that denotes a family's nobility . So in a German last name if you spot a vaughne, you know their family used to be noble , right? The de la surname particle shows up in Spanish and French . Last names like de la Vega or de la Fayette . Nowadays, a lot of these names have sort of collapsed over time and the spaces have disappeared. And there are plenty of non noble people walking around today with last names like Dela Cruz or Dela Rosa . And that's what I thought we were looking at , but it's not . His last name is not Dela Beckwith . That's his middle name . His middle name is Dela . The last name is to speck with . Apparently the family pronounced it delay His obituary in the New York Times has a note about the pronunciation that emphasized the first syllable as DE in all caps . So maybe it was delay but based on phonetic spellings and old newspapers , it seems like people pronounced it like the word delay . And that's actually what people called him . He didn't usually go by his first name. People just call him delay . And bear with me just one more second while we're already here . This family did not have a consistent approach to their own names . Typically you'll see R Byron, the subject of this show, the one we're talking about . You'll see him referred to as Byron Delabeck with Junior , or just his name with no generational suffix, but either junior or nothing. But both his father and his grandfather had the exact same name . I know having your father's name can come with some baggage and it definitely does in this family . But not one generation of this family can agree on how many Byrons Delbecwith there have been . Across five generations of Byrons spanning one hundred and fifty years . It's very unclear if any of the Byrons know which byron they even are . Our Byron's father spent more than a decade litigating his own father's will in court in California . Some of the legal wrangling related to his dead father's business interests made it all the way to the California Supreme Court . And never , in any of the documents , over the course of fifteen years is either man referred to as junior or senior. They're both just referred to by their identical names every time and it makes the legal documents a nightmare When our Byron was born, the newspaper announcement called him Byron Jr. But he would have been Byron III . And he definitely knew that because he named his own son Byron the Fourth. But when that byron's name showed up in a newspaper for a marriage announcement for his son Byron in the nineteen nineties , he had suddenly become Byron the sixth, and I genuinely think that that is because the Roman numerals for the number four and the number six are the same letters in a different order . You know, IV versus VI and he just got 'em backwards. I do not think this family has a firm grasp on Roman numerals . I went as far as to find documents with these men's signatures on them . You know, in for a penny, in for a pound, I gotta figure it out, so not just what other people are assuming their names are , but how they signed their own names, pen to paper on documents. When our Byron signed his draft card in nineteen forty six , there's no suffix . He signed it Byron D. Beckwith . Fair enough, his father was dead, his son wasn't born yet . So he was the only living by Dela Beckwith in early nineteen forty six . But when he married his second wife in nineteen eighty three , he signed his Tennessee marriage license Byron de Beckwith parenthesesis , senior comma V I closed parentheses Byron, senior the six. Remember, he's technically Byron the third. He never used that. He was Byron Jr. named his son Byron IV, and now he's calling himself Byron Sr. the sixth . That's not even a real configuration of generational suffix. What would that even mean . When his son, Byron IV , signed an application for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution in nineteen sixty eight , he signed his name Byron Dela Beckwith Junior . But the junior was written sort of as an afterthought and it's very large and there's room for it to have been after the Beckwith, but it's actually sort of on top of it for some reason . Granted, some guides about the use of these suffixes say that it is really only to distinguish between living relatives . So when he did this in the nineteen sixties , he was Byron Jr. because he was the younger of two living Byron Still Beckwith . These suffix aren't generally part of your legal name, so it can just be a matter of preference . But you'd think your preference about what your name is would hold pretty steady , but there's no consistency throughout any of their lives in how they refer to themselves or each other. When our Byron was five, his father died . And in the obituary , he's Byron Jr. But when his mother died a few years later, there's no mention of any Byrons at all. He's identified only with his nickname, Delay . And most sources don't even mention that he named his own son Byron at all either . The boy's name is often just listed as delay de la Beck with, which is very redundant and implies not only that delay was the kid's legal first name , but that the dela is part of the last name, and neither of those things are true . If your goal is to understand the early twentieth century legal battles over canal rights in central California, the lack of clarity from one byrant to the next is going to be a disaster . But none of that matters for us we're just talking about the one who was so racist he killed a man in Mississippi . So who cares if he's Byron Jr., Byron III , regular Byron or inexplicably Byron Sr. the six . I just wanted you to know all of that in case you googled him and you read the Wikipedia page and you were wondering why on Wikipedia it says he's Byron Jr The answer is no one knows . He didn't even know . So I'm just gonna call him Beckwith from here on out . I'm so sorry about all that . The family name is Beckwith. The Dela shows up as a middle name when his grandfather was born in the eighteen thirties. But if you're still with me, if you haven't turned this off in a rage because I got upset about a man's name again . This did turn out to be one of those rare occasions where the time that I spent on genealogy wasn't a total waste. He carried his father's name , but it was his mother's bloodline that shaped the man he thought he was . And that brings us to the actual beginning of where we're trying to go. Byron Dela Beckwith was born in Sacramento, California on november ninth, nineteen twenty to Byron Del Beckwith and Suzy Jurger Beckwith . His parents were in their mid thirties , which is a normal age to have your first and only child today , but quite old by the standards of the time . His father had been born in California , the first and only son of his father , Byron Dela Beckwith . That first Byron moved west in the eighteen fifties during the Gold Rush , and he was an early resident of Lodi, California. The first of the Byrons Dillbeeck with was arguably the only successful one . He started the town's drug store. He became the postmaster, he sold insurance , and he formed the Woodbridge Canal and Irrigation Company, providing the first large scale irrigation in the region . That company eventually reformed as the Woodbridge Irrigation District , and it still provides water to the Lodai area today . Our Byron's father, the son of the irrigationist, took over his father's business as young man when his father died . And he was less successful . He spent most of his adult life litigating his father's estate, and he eventually won a large sum of money . He worked in title insurance and real estate, and the family appeared to be doing well. He bought a nice house in Calusa for his wife and son, and he would drive all the way to Sacramento so his wife could shop for the latest fashions in the department stores in the city . They socialized with other successful and influential famil ies . One frequent guest, a drinking buddy of Byron's, was the author Jack London . It wasn't until her husband's death from alcoholism that Susie Beckwith realized they'd been living in an illusion . She thought they were wealthy . They owned nice things, they went to nice parties, they took nice vacations , but everything the couple owned was mortgaged to the hilt , and there were unpaid debts on top of that. He hadn't paid their tab at the grocer in years . There were unpaid legal judgments, laborers still owed for their services , and there was nothing in the bank . He'd even taken on debt in her name . Widowed , destitute and two thousand miles from any of her family , she had no way of taking care of her five year old son . So she went home . By more , save more at Scandinavian Designs Furniture this fourth of July . For a limited time, save two hundred dollars instantly for every thousand dollars you spend in store. It's the perfect way to complete your look for less or splurge on your dream piece from living room to bedroom. Stop by a local showroom or shop online at scandavian designs dot com Scandinavian designs. We make it simple . You make it home . In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live . I was terrified . There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black . It scared the hell out of me. That was your first murder case. Yes, Your Honor. It's fair to say this was the biggest case of your career? Yes, sir. Rape the murder from Chung's twelve year old child. Bows he gets. I would think so . People wake up. I'm the one that saw the murder take place by Cremet and Dipo. Anthony DePippo showed no signs of remorse , appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grave Listen to the Devil's Quarry on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts . And to hear the Devil's Quarry ad free with exclusive content , subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts . June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture like Sui Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, Master got like so much more to do. Like France, he dropped like thirty albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we got to be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. You also hear stories from industry legends and hip hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy. I directed one of Nazi's early videos. Which one? One loved. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nose was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem . His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff and he made a young prodigy. No matter the era, Drink Chance brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Affect podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast . Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame , embamel , and paint the Unhoused as a monolith. We the Unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years I've created a space where the Unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed Unhouse parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBT IA plus community, and the policymak ers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. Redian houses a two time Webby and Signal Award winning show with many exciting guests on the horizons. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Gill Witcher , a speak doctor, turned influencer, whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to Weave the Unhoused on the HA Ri radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast Susie Jerger Beckwith had grown up on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Susie's father, Lemuel Jerger, wore his Confederate Army uniform when he walked her down the aisle at her wedding to Byron . Her mother, Susan Yurger, had been a personal friend of Vereina Davis , the widow of Jefferson Davis , the president of the Confederate States of America . But by the turn of the century , the Yurgers were a family in decline They still had some land and they still had their name , but they lived in what one source I read called Gentile poverty . They were old money , without any of the money anymore. Susie's family tree was a lightly incestuous mix of several influential plantation owning families in the region . She was a Yurger, but she was also a Southworth, a Kimbro, and a Morgan . And between those families, they'd owned tens of thousands of acres of cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta before the war . And tens of thousands of acres of cotton needed to be worked by a significant amount of people , people those families own . I didn't go quite so far as to dig up comprehensive records about the exact holdings of these families. That would probably take me a day or two . But I did find an eighteen sixty newspaper ad placed by Beckwith's great grandfather, Hunter Home Southworth . And in eighteen sixty, he was offering a five hundred dollar reward for the return of Albert Dudley and Fred , three young men who had escaped from slavery on his Carroll County plantation . Five hundred dollars was more than the average laborer could earn in a year in eighteen sixty . Census records I could find for a handful of central Mississippi counties from the years immediately before the war showed hundreds enslaved people on land belonging to various Yurgers, Morgan's, Kimbros, and Southworths . Now, Mississippi did have a higher concentration of enslaved people than many other southern states . So about half of white families in Mississippi in eighteen sixty owned at least one person , which was much higher than the average across the south . But even in Mississippi, only more than a few people put your family firmly in the upper echelons of Mississippi Society . These families were in the planter class. They were plantation elites until they weren't . When Susie Beckwith brought her five year old son, Byron back to the plantation in nineteen twenty six , her parents were still living in the past . Her mother was active in the daughters of the Confederacy, and she headed local efforts to get a Confederate monument put up in Greenwood. She even modeled for it.